As I said the other day, perhaps the best news coverage of the new JFK files comes from USA Today. But it could be better.

In this October 27 dispatch, Ray Locker uses the new JFK files to lay out the incredible story of George de Mohrenschildt. He was a geologist, a bon vivant, and a CIA informant who just happened–quite coincidentally, perhaps–to befriend a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in the fall of 1962.

The only problem with Locker’s account is that it ends with de Mohrenschildt’s untimely death in 1977. Locker could have, and should have, reported the rest of the story.

Share this:

Most saliently, Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination offers an intimate look at Oltmans’s collaboration with de Mohrenschildt on the book that would later become Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him, and at the circumstances surrounding de Mohrenschildt’s death and his possible implication in Oswald’s actions.

In his best-selling book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly tells a brief tale of an intrepid reporter — himself — chasing the historical truth of JFK’s assassination in south Florida. But the story itself is a fiction, as O’Reilly reveals here in his own voice.

JFK reality check for Bill O’Reilly

In the annals of the JFK assassination story, rife with CIA and FBI malfeasance, O’Reilly’s fanciful anecdote might seem trivial. It is not the saddest feature of his book, which manages to ignore all of the high-quality JFK assassination scholarship of the last two decades.

In his best-selling book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly tells a brief tale of an intrepid reporter — himself — chasing the historical truth of JFK’s assassination in south Florida. But the story itself is a fiction, as O’Reilly revealed in his own voice in an audio recording first published on JFK Facts.

CNN’s Brian Stelter picked up on the story, and I explained what really happened. Read more

Share this:

As the Washington Post and CNN have reported, JFK Facts was the first news organization to expose Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for fibbing about JFK reporting in the 1970s. In his book Killing Kennedy O’Reilly wrote (on p. 300) that he was knocking on the door of the south Florida home of George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, when De Mohrenschildt committed suicide on March 29, 1977. O’Reilly said he heard the sound of the fatal shotgun blast.

Audio recordings, first published here in 2013, prove that O’Reilly, then a TV reporter for WFAA in Dallas, was actually in Texas at the time and planning to “come to Florida” as soon as possible. O’Reilly didn’t get to south Florida until the next day, as this WFAA video shows.

In O’Reilly’s defense, he really was chasing the De Mohrenschildt story at the time — and for good reason.